The Essential Phone Camera Challenge To Samsung Galaxy Note 8

Set to challenge both the iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the much anticipated Essential Phone is one of an ever-growing number of flagship handsets to feature a dual real camera.

If you’ve ever wondered exactly how Essential is using the dual camera to challenge the likes of Apple and Samsung, then you may find many of your questions answered in a recent article penned by Yazhu Ling, Lead Image Quality Engineer at Essential.

The Essential Phone features a dual rear cameraEssential Products

In the article, Ling details the Essential Phone’s camera hardware and then goes on to explain how the phone’s twin cameras can be used to produce cleaner images with less image noise and also details the often painstaking process of tuning the image processing algorithms to produce the most visually appealing results.

There are many different ways of implementing a dual camera. You can use lenses with different focal lengths in order to enable an optical zoom effect, or you can use a pair of similar lenses in order to double up on the amount of light captured. You can also opt for two colour sensors or a mix of colour and black and white. In most cases you can also use the parallax difference between the lenses to calculate depth, which helps with simulating shallow depth-of-field effects as found in Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus.

The Essential Phone, unlike the iPhone 7 Plus, comes with separate colour and black-and-white sensors, of 13 megapixels each, installed behind identical f/1.9 lenses. Ling explains how a separate monochrome camera produces an image with higher resolution and lower noise than a colour version. This monochrome image is taken at the same time as a colour one, the two then being fused together to create a high-quality colour image.

The Colour image (left) is combined with a monochrome image (middle) to produce a high quality final image (right)Yazhu Ling / Essential Products

Ling’s sample image here shows very clear improvements to be gained from using the dual camera configuration. As single camera system would produce an image like the one on the left, but by combining it with the data from the black and white image in the middle, the much cleaner image on the right can be achieved. Look closely at the sky and the building in the background and you will see far less image noise or ‘grain’ in the final picture.

Detail from the image above shows much more detail in the combined image on the right.Yazhu Ling / Essential Products

However, as Ling explains, there’s much more to the process than simply merging the two images with a simple algorithm. Instead, many decisions have to be made on exactly how to process the information from the two cameras, and this is the main focus of Ling’s work.

As well as ensuring that each camera is correctly calibrated for exposure and focus, Ling also has to decide how real-world scenes are processed to achieve the best possible results, and this means tuning the algorithms to handle different scenarios in different ways which require “deep understanding of both the engineering and artistic nuances of how an image is produced.”

Ling explains that this tuning process has been on-going since January 2017 and has seen 15 major tuning iterations in that time. You can see some of the effects of this process in the image below (full size images available in the original article).

Having been tried several times with varying degrees of success, dual cameras are finally starting to take over. The iPhone 7 Plus’ portrait mode has captured the imagination of many and now all eyes are on Samsung in expectation of the Galaxy Note 8 with a dual rear camera system of its own.

Here’s hoping we see smaller companies such as Essential giving the major competition a run for their money.

I’ve worked as a technology journalist since the early nineties. My passion is photography and the ever-changing hardware and software that creates it, be it traditional cameras and Photoshop or smartphones and tablets with their numerous apps.